In Past Show

About David Ireland

A prominent figure in the Bay Area’s Conceptual art movement, David Ireland made sculptures and installations from crude everyday objects such as cement and disused parts of furniture. Ireland’s work was sometimes described as espousing a “dumb-object” style, in which the artist announced a material’s meaninglessness with deadpan humor, assigning a voice to objects that had been overlooked. In the mid-1970s, while in graduate school in San Francisco, Ireland met other figures in the Conceptual art movement, including Tom Marioni, Paul Kos, and Terry Fox. An artist who merged art and life, Ireland was well known for his house, 500 Capp Street in San Francisco, which he bought in 1975 and spend more than 30 years transforming into a work of art. “I got into the house and saw it not in an architectural way, but a sculptural way,” he once said.

American, 1930-2009, Bellingham, Washington, based in San Francisco, California